


the silver girl and her night queen

by kwritten



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-16 01:12:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2250327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a New York that has become an ancient ruin covered in the remains of a thousand sand storms and the ocean is just a fairy tale passed down through the ages, Jenny finds a queen to serve and the mountains are changed forever. Queen/Huntsman dynamic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the silver girl and her night queen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nereid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nereid/gifts).



> Playlist by kuriyami, cover art by author::  
> http://8tracks.com/kuriyami/kiss-kiss-bang-bang

In those days there were warlords with the strongest at their backs and the weakest in their holds away from the winds and the sand and the sickness. In those days there were no kings and queens and no countries and nothing so noble as knights and ladies. In those days, when the dust covered the earth and territories were carved out of the wrecked remains of an empire long forgotten, there were shaky alliances and steel and cold eyes peering over the edges of weapons of an entirely new (yet ancient) design.

In those days, there were so many things to dread, so much to fear in the dead earth; in those days the strong fed on fear and drank it in like nectar from the cruelest gods.

(In those days, there were no gods.

None that were speaking – as if they ever had.)

 

The oldest among them once spoke of coastlines and oceans – water and water and water. Maybe there are still beaches somewhere in that dry, dying world. 

In the mountainous landscape of a dead city, crumbling at the edges as if it may someday slip away down into the treacherous valleys below, ancient glass and chrome clinging to the sky like the hesitant fingers of a child reaching up in supplication, there emerged (but never evolved, clung to the dead kingdom on the east hill with tenacity, yet it seemed as if it had always been there, older than time) a queen.

And her huntsman.

 

In a time long after disillusionment took hold and far before a rejuvenated need for heroes, there was steel and cold eyes and ruthlessness. Tramping through the dust, yet never dirty, created from the marrow of the land, there was a certain kind of order being formed.

And order needs to be maintained.

 

 

Crossing the steep valley on the ancient bridge that sways with the rattling wind and speaks of times in which giants rolled down streets of pavement and feet were an accessory, not a commodity, from the never-ending expanse of South into the pit a faded, leaning sign tells travelers is Manhattan Island (pop. 1.619 million), isn’t really dangerous in and of itself. The bridge, though long past it’s prime, has lasted until now without falling into the depths below and that’s the only sign anyone can really hope for anymore. 

It’s called The Island because of the signs and because of the old stories – though the meaning of the word has long since been lost to this small corner of the world. Maybe somewhere far away there is still water sitting on the land in long rivulets, twisting and moving with its own speed, or lying alive and waning, licking the earth lingeringly. Maybe somewhere rain falls in excess and water doesn’t taste like dust and earth. Maybe somewhere the world is still clean. Maybe somewhere water isn’t a dream an old man spoke of on his death bed three generations past.

Hundreds of dust storms have sunk the city beneath mountains of earth. There is a theory of doorways on the Island, but more often than not the residents walk through slipping sand dozens of feet above the places where doors once opened welcomingly. 

Most of the Island is unclaimed, the few residents scurrying to and fro furtively with only their own short lives on their mind. Small alliances are made and broken with every change of the moon. On the southern hill and old Queen’s Town there are some poor excuses for small town and communities, but they change and disintegrate with the wind and the dust. The earth is slipping away every day, dust moving from one place to another with nothing to tie it down, so most folks figure why try to find consistency in the intangible.

The desperate follow their grandmother’s grandmother’s directions to the west, to where the old stories say there are cities and towns and green things and water. It’s a fool’s errand – a suicide mission. At least once every few weeks someone disappears into the great west, following the bridges onto the Island and then west again to … to what no one knows. No one ever returns. Either because they are dead or because there’s something better and there’s no reason to return anymore. Sometimes it’s a young couple, their baby still suckling at the breast and the parents full of a desperation that only those who feel like helpless gods, their creation warm and soft and breakable in their hands, can possibly know. Other times it is a group of youngsters, high on their own immortality. These are mourned the most, especially as the population in the South grows ever smaller. More often it is the widow, widower, last child, of a dead one. The ones who have lost everything and don’t have any hope left at all. 

When there is no hope left, you head West.

It’s where hope goes to die.

Or is reborn.

The trouble is no one knows.

One in ten foolhardy travelers lowers themselves off the edge and ventures into the dark deeps of the east. The place where nightmares are born and remade.

No one every returns from the east, either.

Nothing can be said much about either option. Death or not-death. It’s all the same as staying put at the end of the day. 

 

 

But, if you keep walking through the winding ruins of the Island, you will find something rather strange in the Upper East corner. 

A bustling city.

A community clinging to the dust.

A world being remade, refashioned, reformed.

Carved into the ruined palaces of the dead, a queen sits on a throne she won for herself.

 

 

 

_A girl once, not the first nor the last of her people; not pregnant or mourning or crazy; not with a band or a posse or a lover to hold her hand; climbed out of the dust in the South and traveled north to the Island with a deadly gleam in her eye. She carried a silver crossbow of her own creation, a dainty and deadly thing of beauty, adorned with her own eye for art._

_They whisper that she was not made for this world, her slight form and delicate features, her long fingers and thick eyelashes, made for a world when art and leisure were the order of the day._

_She belongs to the world of the giants who built the towers and sat in crystal chairs._

_A girl once, who belonged to a time of peace and decadence, with a voice like a fallen angel singing out the glory of the flesh, pulled the world into a new era with her silver arrows and her golden hair._

 

 

It is easy enough to lay claim to a parcel of land. No one cares about anything anymore but water. And in the land of dust, there only is what there is and no more. Pockets here and there with enough for one family or two. Who cares about the decadence of a time past? No one bothers to hoard anymore, the remains of a dead life living entombed in their own memories.

The only thing that has ever mattered was staying alive. 

So there are a hundred little deaths a year in the time without order.

So what is the loss really? What is there to live for, to fight for?

 

 

_Once, there was a small girl with bight brown eyes and glossy brown hair and a sardonic smile. No one is sure where she came from. There are whispers that she crossed the bridge from the West and knows secrets of the world beyond. She appeared as if she had always been – hiding in the bowels of the Upper East side of the Island. There, hiding between the decadent leftovers of a life from long ago._

 

Most kingdoms are begun with a trading post. A man sets up a stall with his wares and another and another and then someone else comes along and builds a house and trades with the merchants and in no time at all the one stall lingering in the in-between is a sprawling metropolis and there’s a figure smiling down from great heights. 

 

 

_Hi._

_Who the fuck are you?_

_I’m the girl with a crossbow pointed at your jugular. Who the fuck are you?_

_I’m the person who lives here, get out._

_I don’t know. I think I like it here. It’s… cozy._

_It’s a museum dumbass._

_I think I might stay._

_I think you might not._

_Really?_

_Hey! Watch where you aim that thing! You scratched my cheek._

_Do you think I missed?_

_Well…_

_I’m Jenny by the way._

_I’m Blair._

_Thanks for letting me crash here, Blair._

_Whatever. Just don’t touch my stuff._

 

 

 

Blair dragged the Island’s inhabitants into her new world order, not by offering them something that they needed – protection, resources, community – but by enacting her own justice system in which she was law and Jenny’s silver crossbow was her arm.

When there is no rule, there is nothing to break. With law comes change, fear, supplication, repercussions. 

It was remarkably easy, ruling.

 

She sent Jenny to Queen’s Town to barter, she was the go-between across the mountains. Suddenly, there was a middleman willing to trek across the wastelands to deliver goods and information.

Within a year, all corners of the mountains had been touched by the silver arrow sent out by Blair, with good intention or ill. There were laws now and they followed them. They started to flock to her stronghold in the Upper East of the Island. 

They are building a kingdom and there’s a community beneath their feet, looking forward to them.

 

_Jenny climbs up and up and up. The muscles in her legs try to protest at the stairs, she just returned from another scouting trip to Queen’s Town. The South hasn’t sent any reply to her missives and she knows that’ll be something they need to worry about tomorrow. Right now, she’s ready for a hot bath and a long, long, long rest._

_And so she climbs._

_Years ago, when they were still children trying each other on like actors put on characters from day to day, they spent most nights in the old museum, curled up in corners staring up at the remains of a forgotten world. She holds Court down there, beneath the dust._

_Now, they reach for the stars at night instead of burrowing themselves away like small creatures._

_Now, they live like giants and demand the world treat them as such._

_Which is fine most nights, when she hasn’t just dragged herself back home after a long week of walking all over Queen’s Town. When she finally reaches the roof, opening the door with a sigh of relief and telling her aching muscles **not** to think about those forty-odd flights of stairs as a punishment, there’s a light breeze welcoming her. _

_Blair is sitting on the edge with her feet dangling below her, swinging her legs carelessly and looking up at the stars._

_Jenny smiles softly before sitting down beside her, turning her back to the city so she can face Blair. This is where she always is when Jenny comes back from a trip. It’s what makes this building – not so very different than any of the others - **home**. _

_‘How was Queen’s Town?’_

_‘Brought down a few outlaws.’_

_‘They never see you coming.’_

_‘No one expects the skinny blonde girl.’_

_Blair’s eyes twinkle, her gaze still on the horizon, ‘Idiots.’_

_When Jenny presses a kiss to Blair’s mouth, she can only think of how much she agrees. The world is learning not to underestimate them. It’s a bloody road, but it’s one she’s willing to walk down. At the end of each battle, there is a kiss from her queen._

_(She feels a bit like the knights from the stories Blair will sometimes have her read aloud as they rest on top of their tower. She says so out loud once and Blair laughs._  
‘Darling, you aren’t a noble knight and there’s nothing saintly about me.’  
That night Blair hands her a book of fairy tales. Their favorite is the one where the huntsman brings his queen a bloody heart on bended knee.  
‘I would have brought you the real heart,’ Jenny whispers into Blair’s thigh later.  
‘I know.’  
Jenny sometimes feels as though Blair knows so much more about her than she’ll ever begin to understand about even herself. And then she looks down the length of her crossbow at a man crying on his knees and smiles. 

_There are things a queen isn’t supposed to know._

_The blood is wiped clean from her hands before she returns that evening, but the heaviness of it lies between them, wrapping them up like a warm blanket, urging them further into the darkness of their strange new world.)_

_When Blair finally leans into the kiss, biting her lip a tiny bit in remonstration, Jenny feels as though they could topple off the platform of cement and glass and just float away into the night sky._

 

 

It was a time of scrambling and survival. In a time like this, people forget how to fight an idea. 

You have to teach them how to love an idea before they can remember how to fight against it.

Two young girls, of an undetermined age, curled up around each other clean and fresh in ways that no one in memory has ever done. They are royalty and army and warrior and queen. They swim in the peace they have wrangled from the earth.

It is their due, the youth. They whisper to each other of the cowards that fling themselves into the abyss of the West and the death of the East. They laugh at how easy it was to build themselves a kingdom in the dust. They lean upon the towers of glass and chrome and gather the people together.

 

 

_In the early days, they foraged the surrounding buildings during the day to pass the time, while Blair painted a kingdom in the air with her words, filling Jenny’s senses with dreams and hopes unlike she had ever experienced before. They learned about the world before the dust by ransacking it. Explorers and adventurers have very little in common with scientists – both are seeking knowledge, yet the explorer digs deep into the world around her with relish and tactile desires, while the scientist plays carefully, never getting her hands too dirty. In the scientist there is no desperate wish to be a part of the fragments they are sorting through. And the girls wanted so desperately to be part of the world that made the giant buildings they canvassed._

_They found a globe of the earth in one of the first rooms they explored. Blair pointed with one long finger at a certain point of green nearly swallowed up in blue, ‘That’s us.’_

_‘How do you know?’_

_‘New York. Just like all the signs.’_

_‘There should be so much water.’_

_Later they find a map of the city and pour over it, tears trickle down Jenny’s face._

_‘It should all be green,’ she whispers._

_‘What?’_

_‘The bowl.’_

_‘They called it Central Park. What do you think a park is?’_

_‘Something beautiful I suppose.’_

_‘Something green.’_

_They began to refer to the ancient days as **green**. _

__Even if it the world was green… _became a game they played together to pass the time as they canvassed every building in the Upper East corner from top to bottom._

_Jenny had never known anyone who loved beautiful things quite the way Blair did._

_Jenny had never known to look for beautiful things until Blair showed her how._

_Later, she found that incredibly funny._

_That the same woman who had joined her in her love of delicate, precious, beautiful things would also encourage to kill with the sweetest smile._

 

 

It was a time of warlords and territory wars and hasty alliances. Soon, they would remember and another would rise up to challenge her, to remind the world that they weren’t ready for a queen, that the people still had so much growing to do. Growing means fighting and stretching into new habits, breaking new habits as soon as they are formed; means redefining everything just for the sake of having something new in the morning.

It was a time they created with their shining eyes and bright smiles.

 

 

_What are you afraid of?_

_Nothing._

_Come on, Blair. Everyone is afraid of something._

_I’m afraid of not meaning anything. Of disappearing into the dust like everyone else._

_We all become dust when we die._

_I want to change that._

_You want to change death._

_No. I know I have to die someday._

_So what then?_

_I want to change the dust. Turn it into something that carries my name instead of wiping it away._

 

 

 

Carving a kingdom out of the dust requires a certain admiration of fear, a special bond with it, a desire to hold it in one’s hand and let it filter through one’s fingers like sand.

Fear, Jenny learned, was the most beautiful, delicate, fragile thing in the world. It brought even the largest man to his knees.

You make a kingdom through fear. And the one thing the people of the mountains fear the most is the silver crossbow and the small girl with hard eyes on the other side of it. 

 

 

_There will come a day when I’ll curse the moment you found me._

_Yeah… ‘cause nothing good ever came of us meeting. We didn’t just change the world as they knew it. We didn’t just do the impossible._

_I never thought it was impossible._

_Take credit when I give it to you._

_It will be you._

_Of course it will be me. There’s only you and me._

_No. I mean, someday it’ll be me you’re pointing that damn crossbow at._

_What makes you say that?_

_Because there’s no one else in the world who could be queen the way I am._

_Baby you are only a queen because you have me._

_If the world were different…_

_If the world was your museum, you’d still be my queen._

_…but?_

_But if the world was green, hell yeah I’d rip that crown right off your head._


End file.
